Editor's Noteby Olga Stein
Before George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and such lesser known dystopian novels as Ayn Rand's Anthem, there was Evgenii Ivanovich Zamiatin's We. Written in 1920, this brilliant, haunting novel is unrivaled for its clear-sighted exhortation against the cold calculus of Bolshevism. Read more...

Productive Idlersby Matt Sturrock
In recent years, the steadily expanding and fragmenting realm of non-fiction publishing has seen the advent of some curious sub-genres¨selfish little species of writing (part escapist romp, part nostrum) that obliquely address the problem of personal fulfillment. Read more...

Smart Folks, Smart Talkby Paul Drolet
The celebrated CBC radio series Ideas has been on the air for 40 years. To mark the occasion, Bernie Lucht, executive producer of the series has culled an impressive list from some of the show's finest interviews and lectures and produced a book. The subjects run the gamut: democracy and dictatorship, the nation-state, the public good, ideology, utopianism, religion, peace and violence; in short, the warp and woof of this beacon of Canadian intellectual life. Read more...

A Lifetime of Recollectionsby Clara Thomas
LET ME FINISH is a memoir, though Angell repeatedly insists on the unreliability and instability of memory: "Most of the true stories in this book were written in the last three years and came as a surprise to me, the author. I'd never planned a memoir, if that is what this is, and never owned a diary or made notes about the passage of the days. Read more...

Jonas's Masqueby David Solway
In the Preface to his memoirs, novelist and political columnist George Jonas quotes his wit-dispensing and oracular father, a professional baritone reminiscing about his role in Verdi's Un Ballo In Maschera. The world reminds him of a masked ball. Europe in particular is a Venetian carnival, "with assassins dressed up as lyric poets. Butchers lurk in ducal palaces, wearing Beethoven's mask. The mask is Beethoven's, but the voice is Beria's. Read more...

Money and Terrorby Stewart Bell
Look behind any suicide bomber and you'll find a network of supporters who helped him along the path to martyrdom. Whatever its motives, a terrorist attack is not a sudden outburst, but rather the final act of a process of radicalisation, recruitment, training, planning, fundraising, and propaganda. Read more...

Theatre of Chaosby Hugh Graham
While he was Washington's man in Iraq, Paul Bremer was thought by security experts to be "the most threatened American in the world." One plot on his life was aborted because of a traffic jam; in another a roadside bomb came within a few seconds of killing him. One time he had to travel in a convoy of 17 Humvees, 3 Blackwater helicopters, 2 Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter-bombers for "top cover". This was the Iraq that Bremer left behind him. Read more...

The Phoney Revolutionby John Pepall
John Ibbitson is the Ottawa columnist for The Globe and Mail. It is, he writes, "the best job in Canadian journalism." He has published several works of fiction and non-fiction, and has written a number of plays. He is bright, thoughtful, industrious and imaginative. And now he has written a silly book.
The Polite Revolution covers a great deal. It is not an inside story of contemporary politics scooped from off-record sources such as those Peter Newman used to write Read more...

Beyond Propagandaby Richmond Wong
To what extent does A Writer at War present the "ruthless truth of war"? Assembled by editors Antony Beevor (Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945) and Luba Vinogradova from a collection of hitherto unpublished notes taken by Soviet journalist/ novelist Vasily Grossman during his time with the Red Army from 1941 to 1945, A Writer at War provides a rare insider's look into the private life and psyche of the author, as well as the war's soldiers, civilians, and victims. Read more...

Scoring Musicby BTla Szabados
The great philosophers were not much interested in music as a philosophical subject, except for some notable exceptions such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and more recently, Wittgenstein and Adorno. Wittgenstein had a life in music and an acute sense of the development of European classical music, but he disliked anything after Brahms. Read more...

The Full Story of Music in Canadaby Patrick Watson
Within a very few years after settlement began in Canada, music was a sufficiently important part of the colonial life that diaries, letters, and official reports make mention of it. The first documented ball was in 1667, and dancing must have become an important relief from the tedium of the long winter nights. Read more...

A History of Financial Innovationby Christopher Ondaatje
William Goetzmann and K. Geert Rouwenhorst, two Professors of Finance at the Yale School of Management, have come together to produce a handsome volume surveying all of the significant financial innovations that have changed the world. The two editors have garnered essays by a distinguished and adventurous group of historians and economists to trace "the origins of value" through four thousand years of history. Read more...

Measuring Windby Morley Thomas
Marq de Villiers has written a delightful book on wind and weather that is both informative and fascinating. The author has previously published successful books on exploration, history, politics, water, and travel, and in this book he demonstrates that he can persuasively write on weather and climate as well. Read more...

Introducing Five New Vancouver Writersby Lyle Neff
Some four centuries after warlike and fur-trading Europeans first contacted the warlike and grease-trading tribes of the area, the enormous Canadian province of British Columbia remains, in the literary sense, strikingly underwritten. Read more...

The Hurrying Stepsby David O'Meara
How We All Swiftly collects the best of Don Coles's first six books, from Sometimes All Over (publishing in 1975), to Little Bird (published in 1991). This is the first time a number of these poems have been reprinted since Landslides (1986), his previous¨and now out of print¨selected poems. A newer generation of readers might thus be unfamiliar with Coles' early output, making this current volume a much-needed correction to a Canadian publishing gap. Read more...

Wandering in the Clearcutby Adam Beardsworth
In his poem "Literary Terms", Andrew Steinmetz concludes with a poignant witticism: "More than anything, including a regular naptime/ and sex, every writer wants, a close reading." The brusque delivery and emotional austerity of Hurt Thyself, Steinmetz's second book of poetry, make it a collection that both demands, and deserves, at least as much. Moving effortlessly between the ordinary and the aesthetic, Steinmetz's poems betray a terse but compassionate eye for the uncanny. Read more...

Without Conduits to the Real Worldby Brian Fawcett
Douglas Coupland became internationally famous 15 years ago for writing a single tableau that captured both the world in which his generation found itself and the way it responded. Early in Generation X, Andy, the narrator, is grooming his dogs on the porch of a rented house in Palm Springs, California when he notices that the muzzles of the dogs are covered with a cheesy goo. Read more...

Theatreby Martin Morrow
WORKS OF NATIVE WIT
I can never see or read a play by Canadian Cree dramatist Tomson Highway without thinking of the Russian master Nikolai Gogol. Not the Gogol of The Inspector General and "The Overcoat", necessarily, but the one who penned inimitable folk tales like "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich"¨simultaneously one of the funniest and one of the saddest stories ever written. Read more...

Seeing Littleby Menachem Feuer
With courage and aesthetic flair, JosT Saramago avails himself of a radical type of skepticism in his latest novel, Seeing, in an attempt to find some vestige of authenticity in a world that has become inundated with deceit. A sequel to his international bestseller, Blindness, which explores human tendencies toward compassion and cruelty in the midst of a bizarre and devastating epidemic, the effort to dispel every kind of certainty in Seeing is an 'eye-opening' counterpoint. Read more...

Converging Livesby Nancy Fischer
I used to know a fellow whose grandparents missed the Titanic. To their brief chagrin, some connecting conveyance failed to deliver them onto that doomed boat failed. Happily, their bad luck is why he was around to tell us that story. We all know tales like this one, and we love to share them. They are occasional proof of something that's usually invisible: every event, however trifling, may prevent or enable other, more significant events. Read more...

Works from Eastern Europeby Jeff Bursey
In Context Magazine in 2003, John O'Brien, head of Dalkey, addressed one aspect of literature in translation:
"If we try to zero in on the question of how many 'literary' works (any kind of novel, poetry, play) were translated . . . my guess is that, including everything that comes from the smallest of presses and not paying attention to quality or genre, the figure is about 150 works of literature out of the 150,000 books published in the United States. . Read more...

The Same Struggles Go Onby David Helwig
Walk into a bookstore and you're likely to find shelves labelled Literature, Fiction, Best Sellers, Crime, Thrillers, Romance, Science Fiction. The bookseller knows by the packaging or the author's name or the blurb where to put each book so that a customer who enters the shop can read the label and get what's required on that particular afternoon. Read more...

Nanve Primitivismby Shane Neilson
The publication of a Selected is a major milestone in a poet's career, and one usually hopes those having a passing familiarity with Canadian poetry would at least know the lucky poet. Alas, not in my case. This was the first time I had read William Hawkins, and to be fair to the poet I read Roy MacSkimming's colourful introduction after I had read the book, which helpfully explained the reason why Hawkins is incognito: he hasn't published since the early '70s. Read more...

George Fetherling
Like most other famous explorers in modern times, Vilhjalmur Stefansson found that he also had to be an expert at raising funds, attracting publicity and, perhaps just as important, churning out non-fiction books about his expeditions. He published two dozen works in all, the best known of which, such as My Life with the Eskimo and The Friendly Arctic, remain addictively readable. But nowhere in any of them does he touch on what his latest biographer has revealed about his personal life. Read more...

Interviews

Inside Kenneth J. Harveyby Olga Stein
Kenneth J. Harvey
International bestselling author Kenneth J. Harvey's books are published in Canada, the US, the UK, Russia, Germany, Japan, Australia, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark and France. He has won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and Italy's Libro de Mare (the first Canadian author to win this award). Read more...

Essays

Dooney's Cafeby Stan Persky
Forgotten Scenes
It's funny the way books fall into our hands. I was lazily reading an issue of the Times Literary Supplement one afternoon last summer when I ran into a longish article about a mid-20th century British novelist I'd never heard of named William Cooper. The thing that slowed me enough to read the opening paragraphs of D.J Read more...

Essays

(Em) Bracing Young Men With Eyes On the Prizesby T. F. Rigelhof
Given that eighty percent of the fiction sold in Canada is purchased by women, it seemed fitting, and just about right that the 2005 Giller Prize jury (Warren Cariou, Elizabeth Hay, Richard Wright) picked four novels by women¨Joan Barfoot's Luck, Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly, Lisa Moore's Alligator and Edeet Ravel's A Wall of Light¨for its shortlist and then added David Bergen's The Time in Between. Read more...

Review of Certaintyby Nancy Wigston
Certainty by Madeleine Thien (McClelland & Stewart, 320 pages, $32.99, cloth, ISBN: 0771085133). Certainty weaves a tapestry of memories into one heartbreaking, intellectually stimulating whole. A young woman has died; her family is in mourning, especially her doctor husband who is left not only to question his inability to save his globetrotting wife but also to live with the guilt of having betrayed her sexually in the year before she died. Read more...

Review of Miss Lampby Nancy Wigston
Miss Lamp by Chris Ewart, Coach House Book, 176 pages., $19.95, paper, ISBN: 1552451666). "Miss Lamp shines," begins this arch portrait of a lawyer, come back to her hometown, to defend an incompetent, comic-book evil dentist, who steals his patients' teeth. Ewart works best in close-up, concentrating not on court room drama¨which is fairly quickly disposed of¨but on Miss Lamp's memories and the presence of bit players in her orbit Read more...

Review of Lost Girls and Love Hotelsby Nancy Wigston
Lost Girls and Love Hotels by Catherine Hanrahan (Viking, 192 pages, $26.00, cloth, ISBN: 0670064440). Margaret is a Canadian girl behaving badly in Japan. Her reasons are many: her father deserted the family; her mother has turned New Age and gay; but mainly, her brother Frank, once her ally, has developed schizophrenia. In her adolescence Margaret coped with family life by becoming the school slut, a role she replays in Tokyo. Read more...

Review of Stolenby Nancy Wigston
Stolen by Annette Lapointe (Anvil Press, 232 pages, $20.00, paper, ISBN: 1895636736). This account of a young thief and drug dealer's life in rural Saskatchewan locks us into the mind of Rowan Friesen, a young man "known to police" since he and a mentally fragile pal blew up their high school. A master of the break-and-enter, Rowan proudly makes his living stealing and selling his loot on the Net. Lapointe's study of this twenty-six-year-old rebel bespeaks a sombre fascination. Read more...

Review of Unstolenby Nancy Wigston
Unstolen by Wendy Jean (Macmillan, 320 pages, $29.95, cloth, ISBN: 0330447564). High-achieving Bethany Fisher, nineteen years old, single mother of Ryan, four, lands a job as a police artist. Her visiting mother glimpses her daughter's drawing of a pedophile, based on a child's description of the man who snatched her brother. On seeing the same man at the grocery store, Doris follows him home and bashes his brains out. Read more...

Before I Wake by Robert J. WiersemaRandom House Canada384 pages $32.95 clothISBN: 0679313737

First Novels

Review of Before I Wakeby Nancy Wigston
Before I Wake by Robert J. Wiersema (Random House Canada, 384 pages, $32.95, cloth, ISBN: 0679313737). On a lovely spring day in Victoria, three-year-old Sherry Barrett becomes the victim of a hit-and-run. Driver Henry Denton was speeding home to his family; overwhelmed by guilt, he phones 911 to confess, then jumps off a cliff into the sea. Read more...

Kids' Litby M. Wayne Cunningham
Strange, bizarre, weird, and richly imaginative are all words that are apt to describe these two must-read books. Reading Torontonian author Rob Payne's How to Be a Hero on Earth 5 is like touring Alice's Wonderland with Monty Python and the Adams family as guides. The adventure takes place in a space-time rupture between Earth and its alternate dimension, Earth 5. Read more...

Kids' Litby M. Wayne Cunningham
Saskatchewan-born Linda Ghan's newest novel, Sosi, is a challenging story of a young girl growing up in a maelstrom of conflicting religious, political, and historical influences and personal circumstances that transform her from a lively, questioning child in Turkey to an early-twenties gin-loving, promiscuous, jazz-club junkie in Montreal, who has to be saved from herself. Read more...

Kids' Litby Olga Stein
Growing up, I was always acquainted with some kid whose parents were strange and wonderful. They liked to travel with their children, and would always travel somewhere exotic¨not to get away but to explore and learn about new places. Travels with my Family is about parents like that. Both parents are writers, and both are willing to venture where no other sane parents would, especially with two young kids (who would prefer a trip to Disney World, or any other 'ordinary' vacation spot). Read more...

Great Authors

Miltonian Intonations 3/4-way Through: John Glassco Writes to A.J.M Smith
It was a day of research like any other. I had spent hours sorting through daunting piles of documents stored in the Trent University archives, too aware of the warm summer weather on which I was missing out. Then, to my surprise, I opened a file containing letters from the late 1960s between John Glassco and Arthur Smith. Read more...